My review of Dave Eggers’ “The Circle”

In what has swiftly become a time-worn tradition, Dave Eggers’ techno-capitalist dystopia The Circle opens with a tour of the campus. And the campus of the Circle, Eggers’ post-Google/Facebook/Twitter hybrid, makes the last time we looked round the real-life Googleplex, watching Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in The Internship, feel like a tour of the offices of a public utility firm.

Which is, coincidentally, where Mae Holland, the novel’s protagonist, has just arrived from: she has been languishing amid burlap and her boss’s halitosis since graduating from $250,000-worth of liberal arts education…

Arc is the magazine of science fiction and the felt future edited by Simon Ings and published quarterly by the New Scientist.Issue 2.1 “Exit Strategies”, which includes contributions from CERN physicist Michael Doser and M. John Harrison, and stories by Jeff Noon, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Tad Williams, is out now.